Tag Archives: DIY

Today we’re on the verge of a factory in every home thanks to the RepRap, an open hardware 3D printer that is designed to replicate itself. You can make a RepRap for yourself, then use it to make one for your neighbor.

The design files and software needed to build and operate the RepRap are free. You can make one for about $500 in parts. And with each new version of the machine, an increasing percentage of the parts can be produced by the RepRap itself.

This is the next step in my attempt to make a Sarrus linkage based 3D printer. The idea is to have a cartesian mechanism without those long rods and bearings.

I built three of the Mark III and mounted them in a x-y arrangement as shown. They can move over a square about 105 mm wide, and someday may carry an extruder. They are driven by DC motors taken from inkjet printers. These motors are driven in a servo arrangement using quadrature optical encoders and optical strips removed from the same printers.

Winscape is a DIY project for you: install two HD plasmas in faux window frames that display whatever scene you’d rather see out your window. Using a Wiimote, the setup even detects your position in the room and shifts the perspective screens’ high-resolution video to create the illusion of looking out a real window.

The kit, which will run $2,500-$3,000 from Rational Craft, aims to transport you to wherever you want to be, be it San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park or the view from the Space Shuttle. You can even collect your own footage of your favorite places and cycle through them throughout the day.

You will likely soon be able to download hardware from the web in the form of free packages of coded instructions to make… well, just about anything — from a Lego block to the jet engine of an F-16.

The impetus behind downloading DIY hardware from the web is to leverage hackerspaces (those collaborative dens of real world hacking), fab labs (fabrication laboratories), and other groups around the world to shift the burden away from “makers” (manufacturers) to a core group of package maintainers who verify hardware designs and make it easy for makers to do what they love best — making things.

CubeSpawn consists of small Personal Factories which will, at first, make their own parts, and later make as many different things as are added to the parts library.

A “Cube” form factor makes all the machines standard, so that they can be linked together to form assembly lines, in addition, each machine has a pallet mover in the base to transport workpieces between cubes.

Plans for the first machine are expected to be published around mid-march of 2010. The plans will be freely distributed, kits will be available shortly after, for those who do not have the time, or tools to build one from scratch.

SEM images of these ATLUM-collected sections can attain lateral resolutions of 5nm or better, which is sufficient to image individual synaptic vesicles and to identify and trace all circuit connectivity.